You might already have noticed the new notification 'bell' icon in the top right hand corner of the Web Office. When there's something new to tell you, there'll be a little red badge on the icon (just like Facebook).

Some items (like this article about a new release) will be shown to everyone who accesses the Web Office, but other items will only be shown to those of you with specific permissions. So, for example, if we've got something to say about a new template, we might just send that to site administrators, rather than to everyone who just has permission to edit a rota.

When you first log in, if there's something new to see, the Broadcast panel will appear.

We hope you'll find this keeps you better informed and helps you to get even more out of the platform.
 

View content in sub-groups

There's a simple (but invaluable, we think!) new feature on the Documents, Media and Rotas tabs in the Web Office: you can now include in the listings all of the content from any sub-groups.

If you've ever found yourself thinking "I know I created a rota but I can't remember where on earth I put it..." then this feature could be for you. If you go to the root group for your site and tick the filter option for "Include sub-groups" then you will be able to see all rotas (or documents or media) on your whole site, which you can then search or filter. The listing will show you the group the item is located in.
 

Payment Improvements

There's a whole new interface for setting up and editing accounts with our payment partner, Stripe. The process will now take place on Stripe's website, rather than in the Web Office - you'll be redirected there if you need to edit your account (or set up a new one). This partly to comply with new regulations on anti money laundering, but it should make the whole process, including identity verification, much more straightforward.

One thing which we can't change at this stage, is that Stripe refers to every organisation as a 'business'. Don't worry about this - just read 'organisation' or 'church' wherever you see this.

 

Changes to fees for refunded payments

Up until now, if you have refunded any payments you have benefited from an error on our part, where we have also refunded the fees charged for the original payment. This has now been corrected: if you refund a payment we will retain the fees charged for the original payment as we are not able to recover the costs that we incur.
 

Media/Podcast feed improvements

You can now sort a media feed by publish date (ascending or descending. We've also fixed a couple of interface issues in the configuration settings: i) if you have a large image it's displayed at a sensible size on the config page and ii) group/folder ordering is not relevant to all formats so this now hidden when it's not applicable.
 

Security follow-up

In our last release we delivered a raft of security improvements. Following user feedback, we have made a couple of changes:

Optionally turn off 'new login' notifications

One new feature that we added was a notification sent to a user's email address each time we detected that they had logged in from a new device.

This relies on a cookie set on the user's device and so if a user's cookies are cleared then the device will be 'forgotten' and a new email sent the next time the user logs in.

From feedback we have received from users, we have found that some are habitually clearing cookies regularly and find the login notification irritating. Whilst we don't recommend it, there's now an option to turn off the login notifications either site-wide (in Settings > Site Configuration > Login Security) or on individual user records (on the 'Details' tab, under 'Login Security').
 

Buttons on left-hand navigation bar

We simplified the Web Office interface, moving some links to the new security console. However, again in response to feedback we have:

• Reinstated the quick 'logout' button
• Reworded 'Exit to Website' to say 'View Website in New Tab', and updated the icon to better reflect the behaviour here.

 
 

Optional end time in the calendar module

Sometimes it's important to advertise clearly when an event ends, as well as its start time. Now, in the date component in a mini-layout for a calendar module you can optionally include the end time for the event.

While we were there, we also added a few new date format options.
 

Changes to Google Maps

We've made some significant 'behind the scenes' changes to the way we manage Google Maps. This should not affect any functionality on your site at all - so if you notice any new issues, please let us know!
 

Other improvements and bug fixes

We're always looking for ways to make things better and we fix bugs as quickly as we can after they are discovered. This time we've ironed out the following issues:

• If you deleted an image via  the '3 dots' menu on the media tab, it wouldn't always immediately disappear from slideshows etc. This is fixed.
• In order to make the media tab more consistent with the way we list documents, we now show an 'expired' badge next to audio/video recordings that have reached their expiry date. By default (as with documents) expired media is hidden from the list, but you can show it again by clicking the 'expired' filter button at the top of the listing.
• We've made some changes to the quality of images displayed on the media tab to help the tab load faster in groups with lots of images. This doesn't affect your website!
• Changing the duration in an audio/video recording didn't save (even though it appeared to).
• System emails (for example rota reminders) were showing misleading click-tracking information and information about who had read them. We've removed these links.
• When sending an email to users who were the results from a query you couldn't add modules (calendar or article list) to the email.
• My Profile would error if the registration from was set to show consent fields but none were selected to be shown.
• On the website login report you could filter by date... but the report would always show all logins over all time, no matter what dates were selected. This is fixed.
• Gift Aid declaration status was not shown correctly in a query for users who made a declaration that was specific to a single donation.
• If you deleted a user account for an applicant the group tree wouldn't always be updated to remove the notification icon if there were no applicants left.
• When extending a series of events you'd sometimes get an erroneous 'Are you sure you want to leave the page?' nag.
• Guest users were unable to complete an event checkin without agreeing to all of the consent questions - even when the questions where set not to be mandatory.
• We've fixed a few minor issues where the group tree wasn't always scrolling to the correct place in the Site Design area.
• On the website search results page we've made some improvements to the paging, to make it a bit more intuitive - and fix a few obscure bugs too.
• In our previous release, we added a prompt when saving a document about whether to make it the group homepage, if the group didn't already have one. Some of you have fed back that this is irritating in a group that doesn't need a homepage - so now we only display the prompt if the document is the first one to be created in a group.

Coming soon...

Watch this space for our brand new mobile app which is coming later this year.